[b]Haruki Murakami
Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?[/b]
In other words, where does one stop and the other begin? For example, if we actually do have free will.
A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it’s heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean… It takes on all kinds of different shapes—sometimes it’s ‘the nation,’ and sometimes it’s ‘the law,’ and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It’s too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn’t give a damn that I’m me or you’re you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.
Either that or a giant squid.
I’m an average person. It’s just that I like reading.
Let’s decide if this explains a lot or very little.
It is cognition that is the fantasy… Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will… My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.
Let’s decide if this explains a lot or very little.
I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that’s fine with me. I don’t mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.
Oh shit, he thought, which one am I?
We never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.
And look where that’s got us.